Welcome to weekend writing warriors. Many fine authors, and me, contribute short snippets for your delectation. This is the start of a new work, Illegal Aliens. It is something of a cross between a horror story, a science fiction tale, and a romance.
Roland awoke after bringing an attractive young woman home, alone. Something of a surprise, and in some ways a shock. His mobile chirruped into life and the works manager – where he’d been called to examine a mysterious block of Roman concrete – told him the “bloody German bomb, it went.” A knock on the door interrupts their conversation just after Mr Shah explains that one of his workers couldn’t even stand the firecrackers on Guy Fawkes.
One of a somewhat menacing pair of visitors finished last week with “that is irrelevant.” Maybe for them. The visitors found a mysterious note in what looks vaguely like Arabic, in a somewhat illegal search. Roland, in a mixture of embarrassment and pride read it (or at least its summary) last week. Another element from Roland’s past and a cat show up. The cat isn’t in today’s post, but hasn’t gone away (yet).
Roland sighed, Welchmann wasn’t his favourite person, not since that time when he was a post-doc and the professor had made a pass at Janet; more than a pass in fact, but the police hadn’t been very enthusiastic about pressing charges; not against an eminent and well-connected scholar when the charges were based on the word of a grubby post-doc and his wife.
He took the phone, “Yes,”
“Ah, Roland, I hear you’re reading Demotic now; quite fluently if you translated that – fairly obscure.”
“Yes.”
“Not a lot of call for that in Roman Britain, so I’d think.”
“You’d be surprised, besides I was thinking of a trip, need a change of scene.”
“No news about the lovely Janet … or your boy, whatshisname, then.”
“No.”
“Sorry, anyway there are a few cryptic inscriptions I’d like you to look at,” Roland looked at his male guest; the man’s mobile buzzed and he jumped. Welchmann continued, “I’ve sent them to our mutual acquaintance.”
My sincere apologies for abusing semi-colons.
It’s a little difficult to type them in wordpress, but you can get the appropriate fonts for hieroglyphics from psifer.com. Hieroglyphic writing is an interesting mixture of more or less alphabetic approaches, combined with determinatives (shades of meaning) that make it something like a rebus. A reed might be the symbol for ‘i’ and a cup for “i’b” – but a cup could also mean that this word is an offering and not be part of the sound of the word at all. The Semetic people who developed the ancestor of our alphabet took the idea of pictures for sounds, but (fortunately) left the determinatives behind.
The hieroglyphs for Bastet (Bst) show how this works. The unsealed olive oil jar (Gardiner sign w2) is ‘Bs’ and the loaf of bread (it looks like a rising sun to me, but it’s a loaf) is ‘t’. Sometimes you’ll see it with two ‘t’s to make it clear that it is bstt. The final sign is a determinative for a female god. Just for the heck of it the sealed olive oil jar (Gardiner sign w1) has a different sound.
Illegal aliens is up for order on Amazon. I tried using kindle creator on it to control dividers and formatting, and worked from a pdf file. The results are not as good as I’d hoped, but Amazon – in its wisdom won’t let me change it now that the kindle create program actually works from word files. It has, as usual, laid an egg.
You can get a copy of the first four chapters on instafreebie.
You can find my, well our, works here.
The Art of Deception, first in a series of late Georgian/early Regency spy novels is available for preorder. You can get the first part here.
Bastet had an important role in Egyptian mythology. One of the several gods of evil, Apep, would attack the Sun God Ra in the evening. He or it would attempt to eat the sun and place the Earth in eternal darkness. (Though as a snake he’d freeze first, but then logic was never a strong part of mythology.) Bastet would routinely defeat Apep and slice his head from his body with a flint knife. Thus the sun would be available for the new day.
I was hunting for an image of the Goddess and found this. However, black and green eyed is more the way I imagined her. Bastet was not just some “piece of fluff.” It would have been terrifying to be occupied by her.
Bastet (Spelled Bast in hieroglyphs – the et is added to make it distinct when we barbarians pronounce the final ‘t’) is an interesting Goddess. Symbolized by the cat, she specialized in family, dance, and joy. Once you get outside of the major Egyptian gods, the family trees get … complicated. Mostly because the various versions of the legends contradict each other. She’s sometimes the consort of Anubis and sometimes his mother. Her husband is sometimes Ra, sometimes Ptah, and sometimes Ra is her father. As I said, it gets complicated and the authorities disagree with each other. Women would often have a charm of her and attach a kitten to the charm for every child they either had or wanted.
However, it is interesting that many of these mummies are actually not real cats, but straw and papyrus bundles. Somehow, I think Bastet would approve of the substitution.
